Williams 43 - 97

I found so much to write about in these 50-some pages that I don’t know where to start. I found reading the “Journal Entry” prompts throughout the chapter to be really thought-provoking, so I’m going to discuss the one on page 67, “Reflect on your experiences in writing classes. How would you characterize the approach or approaches used? In what ways do you believe these experiences will influence how you teach writing?” I found it really interesting that the book would ask those questions, because during the first half of the reading that is what I was thinking about.

I can see the influence of the Current-Traditional Rhetoric and Romantic Rhetoric teaching methods as being present in my writing education. Surely, as the book discusses, Current-Traditional Rhetoric was at the forefront of the early years. I used to dread getting papers back in middle school and early high school because of teachers “edit[ing my papers]… as though they are preparing manuscripts for publication.” (45) I didn’t have a good grasp on grammar until about my junior year of high school, likely due to the “failure to teach and failure to learn” (45) methods being used, and hated receiving back papers filled with red ink “corrections.” I hated having to revise a draft—which consisted of correcting the spelling and grammar and then turning it back in—and feel like I didn’t accomplish anything for the effort of revising. The rules still didn’t click and all I would do was go through the red marks and make the changes they dictated.

I distinctly remember the shift my junior year of high school into Romantic Rhetoric. I remember because it was the beginning of my grasp on grammar as well as when I started to really enjoy writing again. (On a side note, Adrienne was in this class with me when the shift occurred.) I don’t remember the name of the class, but it was structured so we had several writing tasks to complete in different genres. One of them was a personal essay, and as the book states is really when I began to see that “good writing is most effective when we tell the truth about who we are and what we think.” (62) Because I had a particular interest in the essay, other than receiving a good grade, and because the teacher took the time to suggest revisions other than just grammar and spelling for the first time I can remember, I actually started to take more pride in the work. Suddenly correcting that comma while elaborating on a point had meaning and purpose, rather than just going through the red ink and turning back in the same paper.

These experiences, as well as my knowledge of Writing Across the Curriculum (which I won’t get into—I’ll just say I think WAC is a very good concept and should be used) will shape the way I teach writing in my classroom. I find the “bottom-up” methodology to be ineffective, but at the same time I see the flaws in strictly using Romantic Rhetoric which could easily lose focus and neglect to teach the necessary grammatical framework needed to be a good writer. I am leaning more towards the methods of New Rhetoric, which I like for the idea that “the mind is predisposed to developing grammar… so children do not have to learn terminology or rules consciously; they simply have to be immersed in a natural language environment and they will, over a relatively short period, produce grammatically correct utterances.” (48)

Ultimately, and because I don’t want this blog to turn into an essay, I will end by saying that I think each method has its strengths and weaknesses, and teachers should use the parts of each that are the most valuable to the class they are teaching.